One key factor in growing and maintaining a business is managing expenses. Having carefully planned expense management will help control expenditures and eliminate unaccounted spending that may negatively impact the business.
Some businesses, especially start-ups, track their expenses through logbooks and spreadsheets. While this can be prudent as most start-ups have limited resources, however, as the business expands, data and expenses accumulate which makes record keeping more difficult. Having to rely on manual spreadsheets to evaluate expenses can be time-consuming and inefficient.
It’s never been simple to manage expenses. That is why expense management solutions emerge in the market to help businesses, both small and large scale, help alleviate the burden of accounting.
These programs powered by artificial intelligence aim to simplify and automate expense tracking, generate invoices and reports all in one system. When implemented, this system cuts down on administrative work and aids businesses to make smarter spending decisions while staying on the budget.
Having innovative driven expense management solutions is an advantageous strategy for your business. Here’s how AI can help in automation.
1. Real-time visibility
Expense management systems and budgeting tools have made consistent monitoring and tracking of expenses uncomplicated.
With the help of AI, businesses have complete and real-time visibility into all business expenses anytime using any device of their choice. As long as they have access to the system, they can track, create invoices, execute transactions, and analyze reports at their convenience.
This flexibility feature is a huge help for businesses that have remote workers and freelancers that work for them. In just one tool, data collection, processing, and payment are done easier which kills most of the administrative work. This efficiency allows everyone to focus on more important functions of their jobs.
2. Refined payroll process
Monitoring billable work hours and computing for payroll have always been tedious tasks. To save time and resources, businesses can opt to automate their payroll process.
AI granted advanced time tracking capabilities which are not limited to screen capture, activity tracking, and GPS monitoring designed to oversee and help employee operations. This attribute can be extremely useful in measuring and sharing activity levels throughout the team as well as with clients which help keep track of billable work hours.
Moreover, it saves time by eliminating manual timekeeping. With this modern system, viewing team activities online including productivity levels for a specific period can be done at a glance. It can even capture the time when an employee is online for work and idle time.
3. Automated Invoice
As mentioned above, manual monitoring of time is hard enough - you shouldn’t have to manually create invoices for your employees and clients as well. A good expense management system not only supports time tracking but also automation of generating invoices.
Once the system has collected time entries for a specific cut-off set according to your preference, an invoice generator can easily construct invoices and send them directly to whomever it is due. You can also add line items such as project details, due dates, taxes, and discounts to suit your business needs.
4. Payment tracking
One essential feature of expense management is payment trackers. Having this characteristic you can get rid of the fear of losing track of outstanding balances. It lets you record payments so you know which expenses are yet to be paid and easily mark those that are already settled. This straightforward approach makes the identification of expenses paid, due, and overdue simple.
5. Remove manual processes
It is well known that one of the noticeable benefits of artificial intelligence is scaling down the time taken to perform a task. Using an expense management system will reduce manual paperwork that is often inefficient and time-consuming since data only needs to be inputted on the system. The system will then store this data which makes review and retrieval swiftly. You can finally say goodbye to piles of paper documents.
In addition, manual data collection and processing are done easier with an automated system. Transactions or reports that need to be submitted can be done within the system as well as approvals. This prevents tasks from getting stuck or delayed.
6. Advanced analytics
Artificial intelligence gives the power to examine large data sets and analyze information such as patterns, correlations, and categories that can help businesses make more informed decisions. This may result in improved business performance in terms of spending that can help reduce costs.
Expense management can also help businesses evaluate and examine employee or department expenses. These data can provide insights into expenditure patterns, historical transactions, and breakdown of expenses to name a few.
Takeaway
The best solution to your expense management problems is investing in an automated system. This technology-driven program can help you process, analyze, and eliminate manual tasks from recording and tracking to generating invoices and reports. Ultimately, it can help your business implement a more effective and efficient way of handling expenses without sacrificing transparency and credibility.
